Tomi Ahonen is one of my favorite writers in the mobile industry. His work is well thoughtful and is “very” detailed. His recent post “Datamining our identity, digital footprint, and social context” is quite insightful. It touches upon several of the key themes we discuss in our mobile advertising book like the importance of viral distribution, the fact that actions speak louder than words.

He says,

This is the future of marketing intelligence. Its no longer demographics. Identity is not worth collecting. Lets safely secure that with our customers, promise them we won’t mine their identity. But the digital footprint, that is valuable. And the social context – Like Alan Moore says, this is the Black Gold of the 21st Century, the biggest prize. We can only discover social context accurately via the mobile phone, but the companies that build upon this dimension, those companies will seem like “reading our minds” in how accurately, cannily, they will serve ever better services and products and offers and campaigns for us.

And while you are at it, request his latest thought piece on mobile advertising (details at the bottom of the post)